The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  The Mansfields, whose neighborhood was in the crosshairs of the burgeoning drug trade in the 1980s, made millions from drug sales2 while brutally protecting their prime West L.A. real estate.

  “The police feared us so much, because we were ruthless,” says T-Locc, recounting the days of gang warfare with a tinge of nostalgia. “Everything was done with precision and done right and thought about.

  “We’re the smartest gang around.”

  The Mansfield Crips are an anomaly for an L.A. street gang. Members, who are born from this middle-class neighborhood, are well educated and crisply dressed. Comedian Alex Thomas, who grew up near Pico, calls them “gangsters with two parents.”

  As a result of their upbringing, members can often blend into any situation. So when a record label opened a residence to house visiting East Coast artists some 25 years ago within the Mansfield territory, members were easily able to mingle and befriend some of the early luminaries of the rap world.

  As hip-hop and R&B erupted into the mainstream in the mid-’90s, Atlanta became a hub, and many of the Mansfields followed their famous friends to help with security detail or in the studio. Some even stayed in Atlanta but still raised their kids loyal to the streets of West L.A.

  In the summer of 2008, after Javaris finished his rookie season in Memphis, he returned to Los Angeles for a few weeks to work out and see Mia. One evening while he was out at a club, according to sources, he was introduced through an Atlanta connection to an Atlanta-raised rapper, whose mother had grown up along Pico Boulevard. The rapper went by the moniker “Dolla.” A magnetic personality, with striking amber eyes and MANSFIELD tattooed on the inside of his right index and middle finger, he was already recognizable for his modeling work with Sean John and his top 100 single with T-Pain that was playing nationwide.

  Javaris, who rarely went out or drank alcohol at the time, was drawn to Dolla and others in this tight-knit group, including Asfaw Abebe, or “K-Swiss,” whose brother lived in Atlanta. The group were mostly L.A. kids in their early to mid-20s, who had gone to decent schools like Fairfax High School or Los Angeles High School, or, like Dolla and his brother, were new transplants from Atlanta. The connection was immediate.

  “Javaris saw the glamour,” T-Locc says. “The way we move, people are attracted to that. That’s the powerful part. We got a lot of people associated with us and they got genuine love for us, and not on some bully, gangsta sh*t. Legitimate, like a family.”

  Part 4

  In March, a short drive from the Atlanta airport, where the city begins to peter out into the wooded countryside, I meet PJ at a Red Lobster restaurant, just off the I-285.

  He greets me with a soothing smile and firm handshake. After recently completing his third round of chemotherapy in the last 10 years—this time for 14 months, including four straight months in the hospital—his eyes look worn and battered. But his long, thick dreadlocks have grown back, and his magnetism, which all great coaches have, still lingers.

  He reclines slightly along the booth, and I can sense his mind racing, flashing back to the days when he once stormed up and down the sideline coaching future NBA players like Dwight Howard, Toney Douglas, and Josh Smith.

  “Javaris. Man, he was different,” PJ says. “He was special, he has a good heart.”

  When Javaris was 14 he invited PJ to watch him play, but when PJ arrived, Javaris was clowning around. A strict disciplinarian, PJ was furious.

  “Javaris felt so bad, he wrote me a 13-page handwritten letter the next day,” he recounts, the edges of his lips curling upward and the gold teeth sparkling under the soft yellow lighting. “He told me he was sorry, and he loves me, and he promises to make me proud and he said he’ll never let me down again.”

  He tells me more stories of Javaris’s youth exploits; then, as he takes another bite of the steak in front of him, his tone changes. “You try to think about what went wrong,” he says. “Once he got in the league, maybe he started second-guessing things?”

  When Javaris returned to the Grizzlies for his second season, they didn’t have a place for him, so he was shipped off to Washington for a draft pick early in the season. He played sparingly until the last month of the season, when he finally got a chance. And he capitalized, averaging 10 points and shooting over 50 percent from the floor.

  PJ, in the midst of his second battle with colon and rectal cancer at the time, was struggling to reconcile his own frailty and possible death and pulled away.

  “For a while, I let him go,” PJ says. “I wanted him to find himself and I needed to do the same thing.”

  But things took another bad turn. When Javaris’s third season began, he ruptured ligaments in his left ankle and was sidelined indefinitely. He withdrew inward and soon began peeling off the layers of his youth. He fired his agent, Wallace III, and broke up with Mia. But he still needed his mentor, and his mentor needed him.

  For Javaris’s 22nd birthday, PJ traveled to D.C. to see his “son.”

  “We hung out and had a good time that night,” PJ says. “The next morning I wake up and turn on the TV and I said, ‘What the hell?’”

  Thirteen days earlier, Javaris and Wizards teammate Gilbert Arenas got into a heated argument over a card game. It was widely reported that Arenas, known for his macabre sense of humor, placed three guns in front of Javaris’s locker two days later next to a sign that read PICK ONE. Javaris, who had been carrying a gun ever since he was robbed in L.A., was wary of Arenas and brought his own black-and-silver pistol to the gym. They were both summoned to the general manager’s office, reprimanded, and all involved assumed the entire episode was being handled in-house and had blown over . . . until the details were plastered all over sports channels on New Year’s Day.

  The NBA cracked down hard, suspending both Javaris and Arenas for the remainder of the season, and Javaris was also charged with a misdemeanor possession of a firearm. (Arenas was charged with a felony.)

  Javaris, who Mia says “really felt bad” about the incident, returned to Atlanta but could feel the disappointment from the people closest to him. Embarrassed, he then gravitated back toward the anonymity of L.A.

  A year earlier, Dolla had been killed,3 and the Mansfields had been in a state of mourning since. Dolla’s group of friends bonded tighter, and when Javaris was in L.A., he spent more time with K-Swiss and his best friend, “Lil Swiss,” or “Flaco,” a Latino small-time weed dealer.

  Javaris would stop by K-Swiss’s place often, where they would watch TV, or they would go out to clubs and talk to girls. The Mansfields helped insulate Javaris, they didn’t judge him or feel disappointed by his suspension. To Javaris they were just his friends, he didn’t think of them as “gang members.” He began to feel a part of the Mansfield family and soon got a tattoo of a hand twisted into a “C” for “Crip” on his abdomen.

  “He had a fence around him in Atlanta,” says Mia. “When he came to a different city it was harder. [In L.A.] he thought he was building a white picket fence, but he was building a black barbed-wire one.”

  On July 21, 2010, Javaris got his first taste of the gang lifestyle. Seven months after his suspension, two LAPD detectives appeared at Javaris’s front door and held their badges up to the peephole. They were let in and then quickly began interrogating Javaris about his relationship with K-Swiss and Flaco, and his possible involvement in a double homicide.

  A surprised Javaris mumbled through his answers, downplaying his friendship, and claiming he had no connection to a murder. Two and a half months earlier, according to authorities, K-Swiss and Flaco parked their rented Jeep on Corning Avenue, just west of La Cienega Boulevard. They reclined their seats all the way back and waited for a member of the Playboy Gangster Crips4 who had shot K-Swiss in the torso during an argument three weeks earlier.

  When the target and his wife got into their car that morning, Flaco allegedly jumped out of the Jeep, raised his gun, and fired into the car, missing his target but hitting his target’s wife, killing
her and her unborn baby.

  Once back in safe territory, Flaco and K-Swiss allegedly stashed the gun and kept it quiet.

  When Javaris came by the following day, Flaco asked him if he could buy him a ticket to Atlanta. It was urgent, Flaco said, “family matters,” and he didn’t have a credit card. Javaris was frugal and refused, telling Flaco to ask someone else. Eventually Javaris relented and bought Flaco a one-way ticket to Atlanta on his American Express card. The day before Flaco left town, he handed Javaris the cash.

  A few days later, K-Swiss was arrested, but Flaco remained on the lam. By tracking Javaris’s credit card receipts, authorities eventually arrived at his front door.

  Javaris, still reeling from the embarrassment of his NBA suspension, didn’t tell PJ, or any of his close confidants from Atlanta, about the police investigation. Instead, he sought advice from his new family.

  “He was scared to death about the whole incident,” T-Locc said. “I told him, ‘Talk to the police, just tell them what your involvement was.’ He didn’t have no involvement in it, but police kept sweating him to see if he knew anything.”

  With his close friends in jail, police questioning him about his role in a double murder, and a war about to kick off between the Mansfields and the Playboys, Javaris decided he needed to get out of L.A. Without a contract, he had a brief tryout with the Bobcats but wasn’t offered a spot on their roster. With no NBA teams calling, Javaris got on a plane with his cousin Scooter and went just about as far as he possibly could.

  They landed in Hangzhou, China, a city of eight million, two hours southwest of Shanghai. Javaris’s ankle had fully recovered and through five games, he dominated the league. But China wasn’t just 12,000 miles from home, it was also on the other side of the world from his NBA dream. He terminated his six-figure contract and headed to the D-League for a fraction of that. He had to be close when the NBA called.

  In January 2011, Javaris arrived in Bismarck, North Dakota, to play for the Dakota Wizards, the D-League affiliate of the NBA’s Wizards and Grizzlies. His cousin, meanwhile, returned to Atlanta. Without a girlfriend around, and without his mentors or his friends, Javaris was alone for essentially the first time, looking out across the snowy prairie at all the directions his life could go, at all the possibilities.

  He was only 23 years old, but after struggling with consistency through four professional seasons and owning the fourth-longest suspension in NBA history, Javaris had to know that this was maybe his final chance.

  Despite having a far superior basketball pedigree to anyone on his team, Javaris didn’t play up to expectations. When the final game of the season ended, in which he’d scored just nine points with five turnovers, he was as far from the NBA as he’d been.

  Less than a week later, Los Angeles district attorneys summoned him as a witness to testify against his friends, K-Swiss and Flaco, in a preliminary hearing to confirm Javaris did in fact buy the plane ticket. Javaris, facing his shackled friends, answered questions meekly, his voice rarely climbing above a whisper.

  When he got out of the courtroom, he stood for a moment as the sun beat down on him. Everything was going wrong. He needed to go home, back to Atlanta, to the comfort of the city that loved him.

  Part 5

  On a cool, damp Georgia evening on April 21, 2011, after Javaris had returned from L.A., he picked up his cousin Scooter and drove toward the barbershop in their old neighborhood on Cleveland Avenue.

  After they got their hair cut, the pair stayed inside for hours talking. When it was nearly 11:00 p.m. they noticed another man, known as “Big Boo,” the leader of the Raised on Cleveland street gang, or ROC, had left the barbershop just before them.

  As the cousins walked outside toward Javaris’s black Porsche, two men emerged from the dark shadows and rushed towards them. One looked Javaris in the eye and raised his gun. Javaris never told police the alleged perpetrator’s name, but it is widely reported that he thought it was “Lil Tic,” or Trontavious Stephens, who was just 17 at the time. (Stephens has denied his involvement.) Along with his two brothers, Lil Tic had been for years a menacing figure in the neighborhood where Javaris grew up, as a member of the ROC.

  Javaris bit his lip and handed over a reported $55,000 worth of jewelry. He thought he’d been set up. When police arrived, they asked Javaris to identify the thieves, but he was livid and refused. His car had been stolen just two weeks earlier in the Cleveland Avenue area, and he felt he was being targeted. He ignored the lineup photos and reportedly told police: “I’ll handle it.”

  But Javaris’s temper cooled, and over the next few weeks he stayed away from the area. He spent much of his free time with his mom and his two young sisters. They attended church weekly and he sought to rebuild his reputation. He even attempted to reconcile with his father. “He’s a family type of guy,” PJ said. “When he was back he was real focused, trying to get back on track.”

  Javaris, however, was going broke. He was paying two mortgages, various lawyer fees, and had no income coming in. He asked PJ, who is well respected in the community, to call Big Boo to negotiate the return of his jewelry.

  The Atlanta Police Department, however, was investigating witness tampering during the murder trial of a bartender in Grant Park, and had begun tapping calls between Big Boo and his close associates, according to a source. When PJ called, in conversations overheard by police, Big Boo refused to hand over the merchandise. Soon, pictures of Javaris’s jewelry were being sent between ROC members, then spider-webbing out across the digital landscape, mocking Javaris. He seethed. How could this happen here? In Atlanta. In my city.

  Javaris was working out obsessively, furiously blowing on the dying embers of his NBA career. He called his college coach for practice tips and hired a new trainer, while shooting thousands of shots a day. In July, three months after the initial barbershop robbery, after leaving a nightclub, Javaris and Scooter allege they were robbed yet again, at gunpoint, and sought to have the jewelry replaced by insurance. Authorities, however, according to a source, were skeptical, and when Javaris contacted his appraiser, he was told his insurance had just expired.

  Javaris was now spiraling into a free-fall.

  On August 14, 911 operators got a frantic call from an anonymous tipster that “Crittenton, the basketball player,” had shot and missed Lil Tic’s brother (who bears a resemblance to Lil Tic) from a black Porsche, just a few doors from where Javaris had spent most of his childhood.

  As police were beginning to collect evidence, there was another tragic shooting in the same neighborhood later in the week.

  On Friday, August 19, what is known is this: Javaris and his cousin Scooter rented a black Chevy Tahoe Hybrid SUV in Fayetteville for Scooter’s birthday. Scooter, who didn’t have a credit card, reserved the car using Javaris’s card. Later that day, Javaris headed to Buckhead in North Atlanta, to watch some of the King of Hoops tournament he’d be playing in later that weekend.

  Fifteen miles south, meanwhile, Julian Jones, or “Pee-Pie” as her family affectionately called her, was giddy with excitement. At 22, she already had four children between the ages of seven years and 10 months, and this was the one night a month her two aunts would watch all her kids.

  At 9:30 p.m., she sat outside with Lil Tic on Macon Drive waiting for friends before heading to a barbecue. Outwardly Lil Tic tried to maintain a hardened exterior, but around Pee-Pie he was a doting play brother. He adored her. Tall and slender with a permanent smile, Pee-Pie was often seen skipping and singing along the sidewalks. She was the light of the neighborhood.

  A quarter-mile away, a black SUV with dark tinted windows quietly crept up Macon Drive. At the apex of the hill, according to court documents, as Pee-Pie handed Lil Tic a lighter for his cigarette, the back window of the SUV rolled down, and a high-powered rifle thrust out into the clear night. Four sharp blasts ripped through the air, echoing down the hill. Lil Tic hit the ground. Someone shrieked. Neighbors scattered. The SUV peeled off, then ca
me back to check who was hit, then sped back down the hill.

  On the ground lay Pee-Pie, in a circle of her own blood. Two bullets had shredded through her thigh, across her pelvis, exploding the femoral artery.

  Fifteen minutes later, sirens came screaming up the street. Inside the ambulance, Pee-Pie started complaining of surging pain in her chest. Her breathing became labored. She vomited violently, then again. At the hospital, nurses and doctors rushed into action, performing emergency surgery, tying the artery, squeezing it shut, and pumping her with blood. She passed out. They pumped her with more blood. Doctors looked over at her monitor—the pulses were slowing down. A lifetime was floating away.

  At 11:34, just over two hours after Pee-Pie had been shot, a doctor walked into the waiting room, stood in front of her aunt, June Woods—who had cradled Pee-Pie from birth—and broke the news.

  June’s voice shuddered. “My baby,” June whispered. “My baby.”

  The next day was Saturday. Javaris woke up around 6:30 a.m. and drove to Buckhead for the 9:00 a.m. pro-am game for the King of Hoops tournament. It was the first time he’d played in a meaningful game in Atlanta in a long while, and he was eager to play his best.

  “He wanted to get back in shape, reclaim his name,” said Mandeldove, his former Atlanta Celtics teammate and teammate that game. “He looked really good, he looked like the old Javaris I know.”

  Javaris’s team advanced to the next round, but Javaris unexpectedly didn’t show up for that game, or the championship game the next day.

  On Monday, Scooter returned the rental car and asked to remove Javaris’s name and credit card info from the rental contract, then paid with a money order from Flash Foods. That night, police arrived in Fayetteville at Javaris’s front door with a search warrant. They canvassed the house and found an AK-47, a black-and-silver pistol, and a shotgun, but no high-powered rifle, and as police reported, “nothing of evidential value.” They searched the ponds, the surrounding forests, still nothing.